Weekly Sermon

The Gospel from Unlikely People in Unexpected Places

Matthew 11:28-30; Acts 16:16-40

The Reverend Anne Benefield

Geneva Presbyterian Church, October 27, 2002

Our scripture lesson today takes place in Philippi where Paul, Luke, and others have been teaching and converting people from all walks of life. Acts 16:16-40 One day, as we were going to the place of prayer, we met a slave girl who had a spirit of divination and brought her owners a great deal of money by fortune telling. While she followed Paul and us, she would cry out, "These men are slaves of the Most High God, who proclaim to you a way of salvation." She kept doing this for many days. But Paul, very much annoyed, turned and said to the spirit, "I order you in the name of Jesus Christ to come out of her." And it came out that very hour. But when her owners saw that their hope of making money was gone, they seized Paul and Silas and dragged them into the marketplace before the authorities. When they had brought them before the magistrates, they said, "These men are disturbing our city; they are Jews and are advocating customs that are not lawful for us as Romans to adopt or observe." The crowd joined in attacking them, and the magistrates had them stripped of their clothing and ordered them to be beaten with rods. After they had given them a severe flogging, they threw them into prison and ordered the jailer to keep them securely. Following these instructions, he put them in the innermost cell and fastened their feet in the stocks. After midnight Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God, and the prisoners were listening to them. Suddenly there was an earthquake, so violent that the foundations of the prison were shaken; and immediately all the doors were opened and everyone's chains were unfastened. When the jailer woke up and saw the prison doors wide open, he drew his sword and was about to kill himself, since he supposed that the prisoners had escaped. But Paul shouted in a loud voice, "Do not harm yourself, for we are all here." The jailer called for lights, and rushing in, he fell down trembling before Paul and Silas. Then he brought them outside and said, "Sirs, what must I do to be saved?" They answered, "Believe on the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved, you and your household." They spoke the word of the Lord to him and to all who were in his house. At the same hour of the night he took them and washed their wounds; then he and his entire family were baptized without delay. He brought them up into the house and set food before them; and he and his entire household rejoiced that he had become a believer in God. When morning came, the magistrates sent the police, saying, "Let those men go." And the jailer reported the message to Paul, saying, "The magistrates sent word to let you go; therefore come out now and go in peace." But Paul replied, "They have beaten us in public, uncondemned, men who are Roman citizens, and have thrown us into prison; and now are they going to discharge us in secret? Certainly not! Let them come and take us out themselves." The police reported these words to the magistrates, and they were afraid when they heard that they were Roman citizens; so they came and apologized to them. And they took them out and asked them to leave the city. After leaving the prison, they went to Lydia's home; and when they had seen and encouraged the brothers and sisters there, they departed. Prayer: Lord God, as we explore this story, looking for your special word to each of us, guide us to your truth and light. In the name of Jesus Christ, we pray. Amen. What an interesting story this is. When I talked to my mother on Friday night, she asked me what scripture I was preaching. I told her we were still studying Acts. Then I told her today's story. With the unabashed enthusiasm of a child, she said, "Oh, I love Acts!" I was at that moment struggling with whether the story itself was too long, but her excitement was the encouragement I needed. The story begins with a fortuneteller who follows Paul and Silas around making an absolute nuisance of herself. To understand what is going on here, we need to know a little bit about who this fortuneteller was. In the text, it says she was a slave with a spirit of divination. In his commentary on this passage, the great Scottish theologian William Barclay wrote, "She was mad and the ancient world had a strange respect for mad people because, they said, the gods had taken away their wits in order to put the mind of the gods into them." She was what was called a Pytho (an illusion to the snake that symbolized the Greek god Apollo at Delphi), that is, a person who would give oracles to guide people about the future. Her owners made quite a bit of money through her. We, on the other hand, would have considered her mentally ill and certainly not a good witness for the Lord, but she was following Paul and Silas calling out, "These men are slaves of the Most High God, who proclaim to you a way of salvation." Paul finally becomes so irritated with her that he heals her of her illness, which of course, makes her owners furious. Healed of her insanity, she was worthless to them, but let's not miss the point. The fortuneteller demonstrates something very important: God speaks the gospel through some of the most unlikely people. Here we have a fortuneteller who gave oracles in the name of the Greek god Apollo, but she is witnessing to the Lord. The people that God uses to reach us are not always the kinds of people we expect to hear speaking the word of the Lord. You have heard me tell stories from Tony Campolo, a pastor, author, lecturer, and professor of sociology at Eastern College. The title of one of his books is the essence of today's sermon: Let Me Tell You a Story: Life Lessons from Unexpected Places and Unlikely People. Of course, he tells story after story about surprising people who proclaim the gospel in crazy places and make a difference doing it. For example, he writes: "I was sitting at a table with a group of very sophisticated intellectuals. As our conversation progressed, they began to really [criticize] evangelical Christianity. At one point, I had had enough and decided that I had to speak out against them. I said, 'You guys have got the wrong idea! You judge evangelicals on the basis of some stupid displays of zeal. For instance, at every Super Bowl game there's some crazy guy in the stands who holds up a big sign citing some Bible verse. He expects that somebody will look up that verse…and be saved. You think that's what we're all like, and you judge us by that kind of stupidity.' "When I finished my rabid declaration, one of the men at the table took the pipe he was smoking out of his mouth, set it down, and said, 'Interesting you should mention that. Three years ago, I was watching the Super Bowl. It was just before halftime when the Cowboys kicked an extra point. Behind the goal post was that man that you were talking about. He held up a sign that read, "John 1:12." I didn't have anything else to do during halftime, so I reached up on the bookshelf of the den, pulled off my old Bible, and opened it to John 1:12, just out of curiosity. When I opened it, there were some old notes from a Bible talk I had heard at summer camp many, many years ago when I was a teenager. I read over those notes and remembered what I had forgotten and forsaken. I got down on my knees, there and then, and gave my life back to Jesus.'" Tony Campolo finishes the story with these words, "What could I say? My ridiculing of that crazy man's witnessing had receive just condemnation." [Tony Campolo, Let Me Tell You a Story: Life Lessons from Unexpected Places and Unlike People, (Nashville: Word Publishing, 2000), 105-106] I can't imagine myself holding up a sign reading John 1:12 at a football game. I can't imagine saying a lot of things that people say in promoting Christianity, but as Tony Campolo realized, he Lord speaks through many different voices. When I was in New Jersey at the church in Berkeley Heights, a lovely young woman named Julia started coming with her children, the youngest being a babe in arms. She decided to join the church. Her husband came to talk to me. He said, "I love Julia more than anything in the world. I want so much to make her happy, and I know that my joining the church would please her, but I just don't believe in Jesus. What should I do?" We talked a while more about it. I was very careful not to push faith on him, rather to listen to what Tony had to say. It was clear to me that he sincerely didn't believe, so I encouraged him to be honest with Julia about his beliefs and to respect her faith. He did just that. About a year after we left New Jersey, Tony and Julia came to visit. One of the first things Tony told me was, "I'm a Christian!" He beamed as he told me how a mutual friend named Colleen had put it all on the line for him. Colleen was a very conservative Christian, but while I was pussyfooting around, Colleen was telling Tony exactly what he needed to understand and believe. She converted him. She was more willing than I to look foolish and hardnosed about faith. She was the better witness to Tony. The Lord uses us all in ways that best reflect our gifts and talents so we need to recognize that the words of the gospel can come powerfully from all kinds of people, including the people we might dismiss. The second thing highlighted in this story is that the gospel is heard in some of the most unlikely places. Paul and Silas are praying and singing hymns in a prison. Isn't prison an unlikely place to hear the gospel? Evidently, it wasn't such an odd place for the early church. One of the things that makes me sad is that we Christians are doing such a poor job sharing the gospel in our prisons. For some time now, the Muslims have had a more powerful ministry in our prisons, but that's another sermon. Prisons aren't the only place where we are not sharing the gospel. Sometimes we can really be surprised by the unlikely places where God may be working. Tony Campolo tells another story about the foolishness of some believers. He writes, "My wife and I were returning from New Zealand after a preaching mission, and we stopped in Honolulu to take a break from the long trip. We got off the plane with plans to catch another one on to Los Angeles some five hours later. In the meantime, we headed into the city and took a walk along Waikiki Beach. As we strolled along, we came upon a very strange looking man standing with a Bible in one hand and waving his finger at every passerby with the other. He was barefoot and wearing a dirty T-shirt and tattered trousers. To everyone who passed he pronounced the judgment of God on those who would not accept Christ. "As we passed him I said to my wife, 'It's guys like that who are an embarrassment to the Kingdom of God. People look at weirdoes like that and get turned off to the gospel. Guys like that leave me a bit disgusted.' "An hour or so later, we were heading back to catch the bus to the airport, and we came upon this same man. To my surprise, there were two very normal-looking, properly dressed men standing with him. He had his arms around their shoulders, and as I passed, I could hear that they were saying a prayer, surrendering their lives to Christ. My wife looked at me and simply asked, 'Well? How many people did you lead to Jesus today?'" [Ibid, 106-107] Whether it's on the beach, in a prison, at a ballgame, the gospel must be told. There is one more thing I want you to notice. In this story, we hear about an earthquake that freed all the prisoners, including Paul and Silas. Do you remember how the jailer was about to kill himself? The reason he was going to kill himself is that Roman law said that if a prisoner escaped the jailer must suffer the penalty the prisoner would have suffered. In other words, at least one of the prisoners in the jail with Paul and Silas was to be executed. Yet, when the earthquake freed them, all the prisoners stayed. Why would that be? There can only be one answer: In Christ, they found a deeper freedom, an eternal freedom. A couple of weeks ago, I was thrilled to read that Jimmy Carter had been given the Nobel Peace Prize. Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter are fascinating people. In their book, Everything to Gain: Making the Most of the Rest of Your Life, they talk about the pain of his defeat for a second term as president. They were angry and hurt, terribly hurt, but over time they began to piece together a future. It seems to me that when Jimmy Carter left politics, he was free to live a more faithful life. And look what he and Rosalynn have done. In our times, I don't know if there are any more powerful witnesses for Christ anywhere in the world. Their faith set them free from the disappointment of politics, so they could serve the Lord more not less than they did in the White House. This past week, we have all experienced great relief. We must be honest with ourselves and accept that the snipers had taken away our peace. I received calls and notes from friends all around the country. They were praying. One of the glorious things about our faith is that when we can't pray for ourselves, others are doing it for us. During the past three weeks, prayers surrounded us. On Thursday morning at 7:57 a.m., my sister Jean sent this email to me: Dear Anne, Last night I woke up in the middle of the night with a strange feeling of elation and excitement. I couldn't understand why. When I heard this morning that they think they arrested the sniper in the middle of the night, I realized that was the feeling of answered prayer. I have been praying for your safety and that of your family and friends continually. I hope this nightmare is over. Love, Jean. The story of Paul and Silas in the prison in Philippi tells us so many wonderful things. Remember that some of the most unlikely people in the most unexpected places can spread the gospel, but the most important thing this story illustrates is that the good news of Christ will set us free from all the things that imprison us. Amen.